Daily Tip: In Presentations, More Isn’t Better

We’ve all sat through the dreaded 300-slide PowerPoint presentation, which has a peculiar ability to warp time: Maybe 50 slides in, the minutes seem to stretch into hours, and everybody around the conference table begins to wonder whether they could fake a convincing-enough bout of food poisoning to escape out the door.

Don’t be that type of presenter. Even without PowerPoint, the best presentations are (relatively) short. Don’t load up your visuals with too much text or content; if you’re using a PC and projector instead of paper or white-boarding, you’d also do well to skip any animations. Rehearse your talking portion beforehand, and make sure you know how long it’ll take to walk through the whole thing. Brevity, as with so many things in life, is your friend.